The Autumn Court's Reluctant Bride

Rosamund Greaves is digging her mother's grave when the raven lands on the fence. It is Midsummer in Hemlock, the one night of the year when the boundary between the mortal world and Faerie thins to the point of bleeding, and the bird has a scroll. Her mother signed a blood debt twelve years ago. In exchange for the life of the husband the Grey Fever took, Harriet Greaves bound her bloodline to the Autumn Court of Thornweald and offered her younger daughter to serve for a term of seven years and one day. Nettle is seventeen. She has never been further from Hemlock than the market at Thornbridge. She goes down in a heap of mud and blue linen before the raven has finished. Rosamund has dug every grave in the village for six years. She has an iron dagger she stole off a dead fae soldier and has never once used. And she has found the crack in the contract, because it will accept *an equivalent price*. The lord who comes to collect does not hide his limp. Silvan Harker's face is scarred in twisted lines of silver and green that crawl down his neck, one eye silver, one brown, and his hand will not stop shaking. He takes her offer on terms: a month, an oath to the court's laws, no iron drawn inside his walls, and a place in an infirmary where the steward's daughter has lain for nine days sweating something that catches the light like oil. The court gardens are dust on the stem. The roses die on the branch. And Yarrow, the king's brother, leans close enough for her to smell the rot under the woodsmoke and tells her the thing Silvan will not: *He is dying, you know. The curse is eating him from the inside.* Yarrow is the better liar. Nettle has been writing to him, a girl who only ever wanted to see a fae court once before she died, and he has a key to turn and a tree to wake and a use for mortal blood. Rosamund came to Thornweald to buy her sister out of a contract. She stays because the dying man on the throne is the only person in either world who will tell her what the price actually is, and because a village boy named Cormac Finch has already decided what she is. This is a fae romantasy of blood contracts, court poison and slow-growing things, with a gravedigger's practicality at its centre and a healer's stubbornness driving it. The romance is closed-door.